The Drydock - Episode 232 (Part 2)

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:26 - Why do British naval officers have loops on their uppermost rank bar on their dress coats and US officers do not?

00:02:54 - Consequences if the British continue construction of the rest admiral class to Hoods Improved Design?

00:10:32 - In the Royal Navy during the age of sail who was the "Sailing master", what were his duties and how did someone become one?

00:14:38 - During WW II how advanced was the understanding and measurement of metallurgy?

00:19:42 - Did the other navies aside from the USN use as many diverse camouflage schemes or change them as frequently?

00:24:38 - Potential concentration of fire technique?

00:31:44 - How exactly do you do quality control for charge bags and shells?

00:36:00 - Why are Royal Navy pennant numbers so confusing?

00:40:39 - Do you think that Bismarck and Prinz Eugen should have disregarded the explicit order given by naval commend and should have gone after Prince of Wales after Hood has been sunk?

00:45:56 - Why are ships generally held to be female, named after women and have women as figureheads, but it was considered bad luck to bring a woman aboard a ship?

00:50:37 - Was the Long Lance worth it?

00:53:58 - If the war in the Pacific had lasted into 1946, what is a reasonable date for HMS Vanguard to be completed, fully worked up, and fit for service in the Pacific? Could she have arrived in the Pacific in time to take part in Operation Coronet?

00:56:20 - How did they cut planks / timber for age of sail ships? Were different sawing methods used depending on where the wood was to be used in the ship? Was quarter sawing actually used?

00:58:34 - In hindsight, should fleet destroyers have been split into different types for different roles, or was it feasible to make them truly multipurpose for anti-aircraft, anti-submarine, and anti-surface?

01:01:15 - Safe places to hide on a battleship?

01:03:02 - Are there any programs like GUPPY done on other nations submarines?

01:04:13 - What explanation did Admiral Halsey give for his reaction to the "The World Wonders" signal?

01:06:22 - Impact of a second 'scrap the lot' order?

01:10:30 - What was the difference between Action Stations and General Quarters in the Royal Navy?

01:12:16 - What would Colorado have looked like if full modernised?

01:14:38 - Were rifle caliber machine guns ever fitted on capitol ships as anti-boarding weapons?

01:16:15 - How were radio controlled target ships used during the interwar period?

01:19:03 - The Russian Navy in the Black Sea in WW1?

01:22:04 - How would an uninterrupted South American Dreadnought Arms Race has worked out?

01:28:31 - There is the reasonably well known Christmas Day ceasefire and game of football in WW1. Are there any similar naval Christmas truces, gift exchanges or similar that you are aware of?

01:30:49 - Logistics craft as the largest craft in a navy?

01:32:58 - RN ships with 'super-charges'?

01:38:16 - Naval Attachés taking a combat/leadership role in a time of need?

01:42:10 - Why was "Arkhangelsk" in such poor condition?

01:45:31 - Some of the early US pre-dreadnoughts used 13" main guns, but then the US moved down to 12" guns in their later pre-dreadnoughts and early dreadnoughts. Why go with a smaller caliber?

01:49:43 - Prize money if you aren't on a ship anymore?

01:52:23 - Relative values of the QE's and Renown's vs Fuso's and Kongo's?

01:57:16 - Would the RN have used the SIGSALY system if WW2 had continued?

01:59:01 - Where would the pub gun in Portsmouth land?

[edwardloomis]

The discussion regarding Royal Navy camouflage schemes reminded me of a joke about the British Army and its wide range of officer uniforms within and between regiments: If two British officers arrive at an event in the same uniform, the junior officer must go change.

[notshapedforsportivetricks]

I believe that there was a sort of Christmas truce on the Rufiji River in German East Africa in 1914. The cruiser Konigsberg was holed-up in the upper reaches of the river and a small RN squadron was trying to dig her out.
On Christmas Day, a british aircraft flew reconnisance over the Konigsberg and dropped her a Christmas greeting in a bottle. Captain Loof apparently sent return greetings via a native messanger

[nathangillispie]

I'm amazed by the quality of the content Drach puts out

[SS-ectu]

The star on a U.S. Navy officers uniform designates a line officer. Various forms of oak leaves and acorns are used for supply, medical, dentists and other support officers.

[jlvfr]

Regarding the metallurgy question: you can see this in the evolution of tank armour and aviation engines during WWII, specially the "dance" of ingredients the germans had to do, because of their massive shortage of elements require for hight density/high heat resistence alloys.

[NathanOkun]

The main new alloy element in some forms of naval armor in WWII-era plates was the introduction of the metal molybdenum in percentages up to 0.4% or less. Some manufacturers never used it while other always added it. The alloy element did not make the final product stronger, but had the ability to reduced brittleness during multiple heating and cooling used during manufacturing processing so that the amount of waste due to poor reactions of some plates. Thus, it made making armor less expensive and more uniform for given processing methods. Most US naval armor did not use molybdenum. British and German WWII-era armors mostly did. The Japanese restricted it to improved homogeneous, ductile Molybdenum Non-Cemented armor ued only on the YAMATO Class primary deck armor (7.9 flat -10.9" edge slope) -- the rest of Japanese armor types on these ships, as with earlier battleships and cruisers used New Vickers Non-Cemented of 1931 issue and Copper Non-cemented (several grades ) introduce around 1840 homogeneous, ductile armors or Vickers Cemented (British 1912 KONGO KC alloy from Vickers Limited) or YAMATO-Class-only Vickers Hardened (non-cemented face) face-hardened armor using NVNC alloy as a baseline. Some armors used a little vanadium, also, but not many plates.

The biggest improvements from WWI-era to WWII-era armors was improved methods of post-hardening tempering (toughening), especially improved for face-hardened armor resistance.

[datgood]

we definitely need a Wednesday special type video on target ship crews describing there working conditions and how do they escape if their ship does eventually go down

[RodneyGraves]

In the USN the star indicated an officer of the un-restricted line (eligible for command at sea) whereas staff and other non-line officers had the badge of their corps in place of the star.

[frjonathanhill]

If the Royal Navy pre-dreadnoughts were got rid of, that would surely impact the Grand Fleet, because some of its Battleships would need to be in the Channel Force, now deprived of the King Edward class. Hence the Fleet itself would be reduced in numbers.

[timenginemannd]

@1:14:38 That's a Broadwell Drum on the Gatling gun, it is gravity feed with 12 slots that held 20 rounds each for a total of 240 rounds. (There was one version that held 400 rounds!) You had to manually rotate the drum to a slot that still held ammo. The ones I've seen (don't know if they are replicas or not) had to be removed to be reloaded. I also don't know if the 400 round drums were interchangeable with the 240

[NathanOkun]

My idea of the hit by BISMARCK on HOOD that blew HOOD up being just above the joint of the 12"/7" belts was actually tested by a British 15" Mark IIIA/VA APC shell, among other armor firing tests, during the HOOD's design process since the original design was pre-Jutland with rather limited internal hull armor of any appreciable thickness (designed to resist blast and fragments caused by shells with non-delay base fuzes with very short distance motion after the first ship penetrating impact). To see what had to be done to fix some potential weaknesses this would cause against shells with longer delay-action fuzes (0.025-0.035 second). The problem here was that the 3" laminated HT-steel flat deck at the level of the joint of the bottom of the sloped 7" upper belt and sloped 12" waterline deck was found to be able to deflect upward the 15" shells after punching through the 7" belt, but this deck stopped at the joint of the sloped 2" turtleback deck extending down to the bottom edge of the 12" belt to stop fragments only, so there was a rather wide gap between the 3" deck edge and the rear of the 12" belt. The tests showed that extending the 3" flat deck to the joint of the 7" and 12" belts filled the gap and prevented hits on the magazine or powerplant spaces below the 3" deck. Unfortunately, the following happened when completely HOOD:

(1) There was only a single 0.75" HT-steel plate between the powerplant spaces and magazine spaces, so a detonation in an adjacent powerplant space to a magazine would blast fragments into that nearby magazine and KABOOM!

(2) If the enemy delay-action-fuzed APC shell penetrated the lower portion of the 7" belt at a downward angle of about 10 degrees or more, the shell would hit into this turtleback deck gap, so this gap needed sealing with the 3" deck extension badly.

(3) If the enemy shell came at a horizontal angle from off the bow or stern and penetrated into the powerplant space nearest the magazine on the opposite end of the ship, the shell could continue forward due to the delay and punch through that thin HT-steel plate itself, making and even more guaranteed KABOM even if the shell did not explode properly.

(4) The 3" deck extension was made over the magazines at each end of the ship, but, probably due to weight restrictions, it was NOT done over the powerplant spaces. Thus, you have two large "slots" in the HOOD's 7" side armor protection that can blow up the ship. Not very good design work here.

The design defect of (4), above, is a major possibility as to that blew up HOOD. The under-the-belt hit due to hull wave shifting over spots of the lower hull at high speed is of course a completely viable alternative, though it supposes exact wave configurations and a hit at precise spots on the lower hull that conform to the waves.

[williamharvey]

I love these Drach_athons. The longer the better.

[thomaslinton]

General Quarters, General Quarters. All hands man your battle stations. [This is not a drill.] Forward and up to starboard, down and aft to port. Set material condition 'Zebra' throughout the ship. (Inbound hostile aircraft/Hostile surface contact/etc.)

[gunnersmatemk]

The star appearing above the rank braid on a u.s. officers uniforme denotes they are a line officer, I wonder if the loop on a British officer's uniform is the same thing

[lawrieyoutube]

I see the 'loop' as a stylized loop of rope. Notice it comes from under and then over the way ropes are looped for knotting, tying etc. Most importantly, the way ropes, rigging, hawsers etc are looped as they are 'made fast'. This visually and conceptually conveys steadfastness, security, reliability and the rope's control/command on what it is holding fast over. Entirely suitable for visually conveying the responsibilities and authority of officer ranks I would have thought.
As someone (with a dreaded visual arts degree) who is trained in reading visual language and visual metaphor, this is how I am reading a plausible and possible derivation directly from the symbol itself. After all, maritime and naval lore is impressively rich in visual metaphor.

[alexkarman]

Maybe battleships had so many color schemes because the people who decide those things all owned stock in Tamiya 😃

[Wolfeson]

Oh man, that scenario for the WNT with the rest of the Admirals fully built is a messy one. In one case, you end up with the RN having to scrap something like Hood in order to keep some of the Admirals while also being allowed to build their 16-inch-armed ships (while at the same time keeping older ships like the Renowns). Or if you get into the other extreme where the RN gets to keep most or all of the Admirals and build the Nelsons, while the USN gets a couple of extra Colorados and the IJN gets a Tosa...at that point everyone sure ends up building a heck of a lot of new battleships for an agreement that was supposed to curtail the building of battleships.

[richardcutts]

01:45:31 the RN did the same thing presumably for the same reason. The Royal Sovereign class BB's had 13.5/32 guns (same as the preceding Trafalgar class), the next first class BB's (Majestic class) went down to 12/35 guns.

[l]

I wonder if there are recordings of the few people that were on Centurion when it was being shelled in the tests. I know you said it was uparmored to keep them safe but once the shells start impacting I can't imagine many were supremely confident that the armoring would hold up.

[davidvik]

35:39 Here’s how the Field Artillery would deal with variability in ammunition from Lot to Lot.

I was in a Self Propelled 155mm Field Artillery Unit which would do “Calibration Firing” a month or two before with for each Lot of powder and projectiles to be used in the up coming annual training.

The guns were positioned at surveyed firing points and fired at surveyed registration points. From this the “did hit” data corrections could be determined for each gun for each lot of powder and projectiles and guns of similar characteristics could be grouped in each Battery ie: long, mid, and sort shooters.

With the advent of the tube mounted ballistic chronograph, real time velocities became available for each gun and variations with in and between Lots could be taken into account in the field. Plus we were also able to survey each guns location to with in a one meter circle and spotters using laser designators could do the same with the target. With this plus the introduction of digital computers, separate data was sent to each gun that took into account internal ballistic variables negating the need for grouping similar guns. Calculations were also made to take into account external ballistics such as, wind, air density, and coriolis effect ect.

With all the above it became very common to fire one adjust round fallowed by fire for effect, which says there was no need to adjust from the initial round.